Originally Posted by
MMACH 5
The study doesn't account for any non-fatal accidents. It is based entirely on news reports and blogs.
The reason that most studies look at fatal collisions only is that those are the situations that are well documented and reported.
"Mere" injuries are reported far less reliably and consistently.
As for the study itself,
this would give a lot more detail on it. Given that they were trying to show that FARS could be improved, they had to get their data from somewhere.
From their report --
Our Every Bicyclist Counts dataset is limited to fatalities and depended upon public sources and input. The majority of the information captured by Every Bicyclist Counts came from newspaper reports (56% of all reported sources), TV reports (25%) and blogs (19%).
Through these sources we collected information on 76% of the bicyclist fatalities reported in FARS in 2012. Since the Every Bicyclist Counts dataset is limited to fatalities it does not contain any information on injuries, near-misses, or general exposure to risks.
Personally, I'm surprised that they didn't get any from police press releases -- our police releases such things every time somebody dies.
But ultimately, I don't have any real problems with their methodology. Its not perfect, but this sort of thing never is.